Sebastian Vettel may have fallen short in his bid to win a fourth straight Singapore Grand Prix at Marina Bay today, but the defending world champion was pleased to extend his streak of podiums at the race to five and pick up just his third top-three finish of the season.
The German driver made a good start to move up to second place, and although he did come close to beating Lewis Hamilton for the race win after the Briton’s final pit stop, he was powerless to stop the Mercedes driver from sweeping to his seventh win of the season.
“It’s a circuit that I really enjoy and really like, the atmosphere is great,” Vettel said. “It’s a tough one, it’s two hours, again we went until the full two hours.
“I had a good start, got past Daniel and then had a decent race, played a little bit with strategy and then the safety car came out at the worst possible moment for us, so we tried to stay out with the last set of tires and make them work, which was very borderline – a lot of pressure from Daniel and also from Fernando behind, but I was very happy to make it P2.”
The Singapore Grand Prix is one of the most demanding races on the calendar, running in hot and humid conditions for almost two hours, with a number of drivers suffering from dehydration after the race. However, Vettel had no such problem thanks to his podium finish.
“It is, yes, it’s quite hot,” he said. “The cars are sliding a lot so you have to focus quite hard, but it’s definitely a race that we all enjoy as drivers because it’s such a big challenge, and to stand up here, you get a cool bottle of champagne which is quite nice.”
With this result, Vettel has moved back into fifth place in the drivers’ championship ahead of Williams’ Valtteri Bottas, who dropped outside of the points in the final few laps of the race as his tires faded.
